sometimes i brood on my failure to market successfully - maybe i'm a bad writer. i somehow naively thought that when people read good short stories they'd want to read more. or the same with haiku, which actually is even more naive. nobody pays to read haiku, i guess. but it's not even that i need the money, as time goes by, i feel like i need the recognition, and that comes in the form of money. if they buy it, they are recognizing you. if not, it's just a bunch of words on a sea of self-published dreck.

so i pound away at twitter and the social media; i put my pop art up there, and hope people recognize a kind of jangled, artistic way of looking at things. that's what i'm selling, after all. but nothing. i don't think people buy stuff off of twitter, but even if they do, it's like what, you have to have a thousand viewers to get one click, and a thousand clicks to get one sale.

i worry a little about whether i may have given away too much of it (my first few books of stories are all online, pretty much), or if too much of the early stuff is still out there; presumably i've gotten better. but i also worry about not getting better. the purpose of this very blog is to ensure that i keep writing no matter what. but i'm a little careless with it; i let myself ramble. i let myself not worry about such things as caps or formal language. and as a result some of my carelessness spills over into my regular writing. my sister says, "too many commas!" and what i think she means is, tortured turn of phrase, as my wife puts it, that distract the reader from what you're saying into attention to the way you say it. too much of that, and it's no fun to read any more.

in transcribing the work of my great great grandfather i'm impressed by how careful he is. he uses some things i would never dream of, in terms of informality, but he never uses a contraction, for example, and he clips his paragraphs. he gives the reader just what the reader can take. his sentences are careful. he was a bitter old man, convinced that his life was ruined unnecessarily, but he was interesting in that way at least: he was a good writer. i am going to pick up from him that sense of discipline, and apply it to everything i do.

at the moment i am doing about five things: finishing prairie leveretts, a story about one great-great grandfather who settled nebraska during the civil war; publishing the story of my life, the autobiography of the other great-great grandfather, treasurer of hillsdale college in its early days, and one of its first students; finishing comin' 'round to lovin' it, mcdonald's short stories; writing an iowa novel, which is kind of a documentation of a poetry movement, a documentation of a fantastic vegetarian restaurant and bakery, and at the same time, a love novel and tribute to some of the things i went through in iowa. what do you do when you fall in with someone who is, cough cough, just not the right person. it happens all the time, unfortunately. and my mission which is easy in this case, is to fill in all the details, true or not, of what i remember of iowa city at the time. my goal is to let the characters say it, so i don't have to. actually it's harder to let the characters say it, because you have to then make dialogue. but i'm up to it. it's a tall order.

and then on the marketing front, i've noticed the blogs. this is the prime example. i have eighteen hundred people coming through here every month. presumably some are coming through to read it, or care about what is happening in my life, as friends, but i don't have eighteen hundred friends; the other theory is that they are clicking around looking for something interesting. and maybe they find it, maybe they don't. probably seventeen hundred just click right back out the minute they get here. but there are still a lot of eyes on this page, and if i get the eyes on the right thing, maybe that'll help. what i'm telling you is that i might go commercial to some degree: make some blogs so that they direct a person's attention in the right direction, and thus get them to help me. this might be better than the alternative, which is to continue to use them to make my writing sloppier, more reckless, more free-form random.

a sleepy morning here - my wife is in alamo, with the fifteen-year-old, buying cleats; his sister is spending the night a friend's. the twelve-year-old is around, brooding, watching media, occupying a pig-sty. the puppy is on my lap - that's where he likes to be. we get mad at him when he barks at the deer, the rabbits, and the skunks, but that's what he does, it's his job, it's part of his identity. you could try to make him shut up (we do), but he doesn't really understand that. fortunately we feed him plenty. we like having him around. he curls up and looks cute and he anchors us wherever we are. that, i think, is his job too. as he sits here i'm not sure if he knows i am writing about him, but he knows how to place himself so i pet him as much as possible, which of course is good for my mental health. and my mental health is the most important. none of the above projects can be finished without it.

new mexico is about to turn, from the driest of the dry seasons, to what they call the monsoon. this happens around july fourth. we get what little rain we get all year on the fourth of july, or rather, from the fourth and six weeks into the end of the summer. it's not "monsoon" in the sense that you have it in, say, the philippines, but it's what we've got. we watch the clouds roll in from the southwest, from zipolite and oaxaca state, up through the great chihuahuan desert, and up past el paso to here, and it drops a little on us, and we're grateful. my greenthread, my navajo tea, will be grateful too, and will breathe, and enjoy life at its best, with just a little water. what else i could grow, i'm not sure, probably peppers (peppers grow most places in new mexico), but that's for another day, another post. chou.